Trust
is the secret sauce of all relationships. Without trust, drama often
arises so things don’t get done effectively and efficiently. When trust
is low on a team, making decisions takes longer and issues get revisited
over and over and are rarely resolved. Low trust leads to more stress,
less fun and high turnover.

As
best-selling business author Patrick Lencioni notes in his book "The
Five Dysfunctions of a Team," trust is the fundamental element of
teamwork. Teams that don't trust each other don't share everything
that's going on, don't get to learn everything about an issue, and
isolate themselves into silos. In Lencioni's view, no team is really a
team until its members fully trust each other. So getting the trust
issue right is the critical first step for any leader.

Conscious
leaders develop through three stages of trust. Knowing this path and
being able to determine which stage you’re in is a key to self-awareness
and transformational leadership.

Stage 1: I trust you.

Stage 1 leaders make trust a function of the other person.

I
trust you if you are trustworthy. If you’re not, I don’t trust you. If
you do what you say you’ll do I’ll trust you. If you tell the truth I’ll
trust you. If you’re competent to do your job I’ll trust you. If you
are generally unselfish and care for the team more than yourself I’ll
trust you. My trust is a function of your behavior, character and
competency.

Stage
1 leaders locate trust and trustworthiness “out there.” Trust is highly
variable for these leaders because what’s out there changes all the
time. They are “at the effect of” them and it. They are in “to me” consciousness around trust, thus below the line.

Most people live and lead this way without ever going to stage 2 or 3.

Stage 2: I trust me.

Stage 2 leaders trust themselves.

Trusting
myself means that I trust myself to be OK regardless of what you do or
don’t do. This level of trust is directly related to sourcing approval,
control and security from the inside (commitment #11 of The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership).
The more I can reliably source the three great needs of humans from the
inside in a solid and imperturbable way, the more I can trust myself to
be genuinely OK regardless of what you do or don’t do.

I also trust myself to learn from everything and everyone that life puts in my path.
Stage 2 leaders are so committed to curiosity and learning that they
see all of life as an opportunity to learn and grow, as an invitation to
wake up.

So if you
(the other out there) don’t do what you said you would do (a trust
breech for a level 1 leader), I see this as an opportunity for me to
learn and grow. Possibly I learn more about making clear agreements. Or I
learn about being more candid or feeling my feelings or creating
conscious relationships on my team. What you do or don’t do is simply an
opportunity for me to learn and grow. It’s a gift.

Conscious leaders who trust themselves say this to themselves about other people:

“I
trust you to do exactly what you do or don’t do. Whatever you do or
don’t do I’m going to use for my growth and learning as a leader. My
trust in you is unshakable because I trust you to be exactly who you are
and do exactly what you do.”

This approach to life radically changes relationships.

At
this point people usually ask, “If I trust people to do what they do
and be who they are, won’t that mean people will do whatever they want
and my life will be filled with people who are untrustworthy?”

Fair enough, but just for the sake of learning consider these responses.

Yes,
people will do what they want. But they’ll do that anyway whether
you’re badgering them to be more trustworthy or not. How many people in
your life have really become more trustworthy because you sought to
change them? Probably very few.

Second,
you get to fill your life with whatever kind of people you want. This
is a radical idea that most people don’t believe. But it’s true. From
above the line as the creator of your life you get to choose who to
have, and not have, in your life. Most stage 2 conscious leaders who
trust themselves choose to fill their lives with people they can learn
from by the person being exactly as they are. They also choose to fill
their lives with people who are equally committed to learning and being
curious, speaking candidly, keeping their agreements, living in
integrity and valuing appreciation.

People
who can trust themselves to be OK with others being just as they are
usually have powerful transformational relationships.

Stage 3: I trust.

Stage
3 leaders trust the universe. (Feel free to substitute whatever word
works for you in place of universe. It could be God, Love, The Quantum
Field, Source, Jesus or any of a thousand other words or something
beyond words. As the Tao says, “That which can be named is not the
Tao.”)

Einstein
said that the most important question is, “Is the universe friendly?”
He went on to say that if it is, then about 99% of everything we do is a
waste of time because most of our lives are spent reacting to the world
as though it is unfriendly. Stage 3 trust leaders understand this, not
as a belief only, but as an experience in their bodies. They have
fundamental trust that the universe is “for” them.

Stage
1 trust leaders experience the world as “to them.” Trust for them is
variable based on the world happening to them. Stage 2 leaders
experience the world as “by them” (I create my world because I trust
myself to learn from any and all outcomes). Stage 3 trust leaders
experience the world as “for them.” For them to expand and evolve into
the highest state of who they are; for them to wake up; for them to be
fully free; for them to experience uncaused joy and the elimination of
suffering.

Stage
3 leaders who trust the universe to be for them have come to this
experience through devoted practice. Almost all stage 3 leaders were
once (and still at times are) stage 1 leaders who outsource trust to
others and stage 2 leaders source trust in themselves. Stage 3 leaders
have done the work to change their consciousness from “to me” to “by me”
to “for me.” This work usually includes a commitment to some deep
practice over many years. This practice could include meditation or
listening prayer or The Work by Byron Katie (commitment #10) or The Sedona Method by Hale Dwoskin (commitment #11) or Dzogchen Buddhism or countless other practices that have led many people to the direct experience that everything is for them.

In
truth very few leaders in our world are leading from stage 3 trust.
Most are still solidly in stage 1 and a few are shifting to stage 2. At
The Conscious Leadership Group we spend our energy supporting leaders to
move from stage 1 to stage 2. It’s great fun and the results are
profound. We also believe that the world desperately needs stage 3 trust
leaders who can hold a consciousness of love. We choose to believe that
these leaders are coming.